Jiří Valoch’s artistic practice has been fundamentally defined by a sensitivity to language since the mid-1960s. Valoch created his first textual installation in the spring of 1970, during the last pioneering years of conceptual art. From an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, we know that this piece was a minimal object poem titled ticho (silence), and that it was included in an exhibition by the Club of Concretists at Brno’s House of the Lords of Kunštát (13–30 March 1970). In this single word, rendered in black on a white, horizontally oriented panel, special emphasis was placed on the letter “i” – by “dotting” it from both above and below, Valoch disrupted the word’s conventional semantics, leaving the viewer uncertain how to approach the work and how to interpret it.
If we take a brief look at the history of linguistically oriented conceptualism, we find that Valoch’s textual installation was created less than two years after Lawrence Weiner produced his first work of this kind, and just one year after Robert Barry took a similar approach to language as an artistic medium. It was even made two years before Heinz Gappmayr created his first Raumtexte in neighbouring Austria. From the perspective of speculative art history, meaning a history of what might have been or of things that were only planned but never realized, by the early 1970s Jiří Valoch had thus already established himself alongside this internationally known trio of artists working with text-based installations.
During the Normalization years, Valoch was unable to show his textual installations at galleries, and although he only began making them again in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s he never entirely abandoned the medium. Text-based works have been preserved in the form of designs that he sent to his foreign contacts throughout the 1970s and 1980s, some of which were subsequently realized. These include Projekten für die Ausstellung (design: 1969–1971, Klaus Groh Archive), which was realized at Erfurt’s Exile Gallery in 2026, and a text wall for the group exhibition Die Ecke / The Corner / Le Coin, held at Edition & Galerie Hoffmann in Friedberg, Germany, in 1986 and reprised at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1988.
The text wall “this work is merely an aesthetic fiction”, prepared specifically for the GMU exhibition spaces, is based on a design created by Valoch in 1980. It is a commentary on the status of art from the perspective of both its institutional context and its individual perception. The work shows that, for Valoch, language is more than just a means for describing works of art – it is the very “site” where art takes place. The simple statement “this work is merely an aesthetic fiction” simultaneously designates, questions and constitutes a work whose existence is contingent upon the act of reading and interpretation.
JIŘÍ VALOCH (b. 1946) – following his Surrealist beginnings (until 1963), Valoch turned to concrete poetry. After a period of typogrammes and visual poems that worked exclusively with the visual semantics of letterforms, in the late 1960s he began to produce linguistically oriented conceptual art while and to work with photography, text-based installations and drawing. During the totalitarian era, he circulated his work abroad through postal contacts and became an important representative of the European neo-avant-garde. Since 1966, he has also been active as an art critic, curator and collector. In 2002, Valoch donated a substantial part of his collection to the National Gallery Prague, and in 2012–2016 he transferred his archive and collection to the Moravian Gallery in Brno. These gifts make him an important patron of the arts withing recent Czech history. In 2023, Valoch was awarded the international Prix d’honneur of the Bernard Heidsieck–Centre Pompidou literary award for his outstanding contribution to the use of text in intermedia artistic practice outside of traditional literature.
